Current cancer treatment options typically involve a combination of invasive surgery to excise cancerous tissue that can be detected, followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The latter two treatments, while causing substantial tissue damage and illness, are deployed as tools to kill any cancer cells that remain and which either could not be detected or could not be removed. These methods are not very effective in reducing cancer recurrence, especially in patients whose cancers are detected at late stages. If we consider cases in which cancer is detected at an early stage, so that cancer cells have not yet been disseminated from the primary site, surgery may leave residual cancer cells in the periphery of the tumor site and/or can cause tumor fragmentation, which can increase the chances of recurrence. In additional, natural wound healing processes initiated at the surgical site flood the area with growth factors, and this can stimulate enhanced proliferation or migration of any residual cancer cells (which is one reason that radiation is generally applied locally, after surgery). In breast cancer, if tumor formation recurs, it tends to be in the lungs or in lymph nodes near the breast tissue. The major source of this type of metastasis is residual cancerous cells left by invasive tumor removal procedures, such as a lumpectomy, even with the application of combined radio- and chemotherapy treatments, or by recurring cancerous cells at the primary tumor site, which then become metastatic, by migrating into lymphatic channels or blood vessels. Besides the common case of cancer recurrence, patients who are treated according to the most common disease management protocol often suffer from a variety of severe side effects of current treatments. Chemotherapeutics and gamma irradiation treatments often lack specificity and damage healthy tissue in the process, which leads to discomfort or pain that exhausts patients, depresses their immune systems, and begin tissue remodeling processes that have long-term negative health consequences (e.g., edema, scarring, or lung damage eventually leading to impaired breathing).
At this time, there is a clear need to provide alternative approaches to the treatment of cancer and other diseases involving the dissemination of cells with pathological characteristics.